What Would You Do?

23Dec

A few weeks ago my brother in law moved into our house with us so that we could save him and his dog from the horrible living conditions they were in. After moving in he decided to join us in our WoW playing habits and is now leveling like a mad man on a Recruit A Friend kick with his sister (my wife). We’re going to call this brother in law Bill because, well Brother In Law sort of spells that out.

Bill happens to be a graphic designer of sorts, though he hasn’t had the opportunity to work in the field professionally in a number of years. Despite the lack of recent work experience the guy’s a brilliant artist and he likes to take advantage of the opportunity to modify character and item models in games.

Before playing WoW he was working on mods to change all of the graphics for Fallout 3, but not that WoW is the game he’s focusing on he’s looking to do it with WoW instead. When he first got the idea to do it with WoW he went out and downloaded several addons that do some of this type of thing already and tried them out. Some of them are pretty cool, some of them are crap, but in the end he wasn’t especially satisfied because he’s the most obsessive customizer I’ve ever met. If he could customize the individual particles of dirt that your characters walk on he would do it, no joke.

Bill’s first idea was to get rid of all the blocky looking armor that characters start out with and replace things like bright green leggings that are rewarded for a quest where you killed dark grey wolves and so on just to make things more realistic. (Well, his real first thoughts were more along the lines of making the female robes just a little bit more revealing, but we don’t need to bring that up here.)

My wife’s first thoughts were to allow changing of colors so that if you had a nice set of blue gear and suddenly a very nice chest upgrade dropped you could change it for the hideous green color to the blue that would match the rest of your gear.

My first thought was to just design me set of dream gear and just have every chest piece that I could possibly equip just look like my dream gear all the time. Tier 4 Shaman all the time? That’s what I’m talking about.

So here is my question to you: If you had the power to change the way things looked in game, what would you do?

5 responses to “What Would You Do?”

I’m downright obsessive about matching gear, but I wouldn’t make any artificial changes. For me, collecting an awesome looking set is as much a part of the game as gearing up to raid. I’m also pretty sure that mods like this are against the terms of use. I don’t imagine it’s easy for Blizzard to enforce, but I wouldn’t risk my account on it.

I think you’re right on the mods being against the ToS, and I’ve already explained it to “Bill” as such so he’s aware of it.

I understand where you’re coming from no wanting to build your own set of gear as I used to be the same way. Over the years my time to play games in general got smaller and smaller to the point that I had to leave old habits behind in order to simply play the games and that was one that got left behind and now I just can’t bring myself to care as much as I used to.

At this point I just focus on the stats and don’t care whether I look like the coolest kid on the block or a circus clown, as long as the gear helps me out I no longer care. But, if I would love to have the option of customizing my gear to some degree without having to spend the time to hunt down specific pieces. I do enough of that with my various twinks. ;)

I would update the character models, keeping the same feel as Blizzard intended but just increase their polygon count, add some more animations and add a lot more facial variety. I think the WoW armor is cool but the original character models are terrible.

I hear a lot about updating character models on other blogs or in discussions I’ve had with other people. I see that as a fairly common request.

And I fully support the increase of facial choices as well as a bit more customization in the character itself. I hate that I take my human mage’s armor off and he’s ripped. I’m a mage dang it, I should a twig not an ancient oak.

I wouldn’t mind being able to modify weight a bit more as well as the amount of slouching that tauren/trolls have. Some things just shouldn’t be so universal.

I’m with “We Fly Spitfires”. Update the character models please. Especially the trolls as female trolls only have like two faces that don’t immediately scream hag. And allow a bit more character customization by letting us choose how stout & buff the toon is. A mage does not need to be the He-Man a warrior or paladin is.